 Hey everyone, Adam Shaw here from Bravura Media Company. Today we're going to be showing you guys two very, very, very old maps of Fort Detroit. We're showing you two maps because really there were two different Fort Detroit's. They were built for many, many different reasons. That being said, we're going to zoom in and kind of explore and examine these old maps. But before we do, let's kind of give a historical background to the two different Forts. The first Fort was named Fort Pontchartrain de Detroit, and it was a Fort established by French officer Antoine de la Mode Cadillac in 1701. The Fort was located in the vicinity of Larn Street and Griswold Street. Antoine de la Mode Cadillac ordered Fort Detroit to be built on the Detroit River to try to keep the British from moving into the West and to really monopolize the fur trade in Central North America. When Antoine de la Mode Cadillac landed on the site, he held a grand celebration to formally take control of the area. Cadillac then named the area Fort Pontchartrain de Detroit in honor of Louis-Fellet-Fu Conte de Pontchartrain, who was minister-marine to Louis XIV. The storehouse and stockade were started immediately, but the first building that was completed was the St. Anne's Church. After the Fort was established, some Ottawa and Huron moved into the area for the convenience of trading with the French. The first major conflict of Fort Detroit occurred in March 1706 while Cadillac was away. The Ottawa heard a rumor about Huron Tribe ambush. The Ottawa then attacked and killed several members of the Miami Indian tribe. The Miami sought safety in the Fort, where they were defended by French soldiers. The French killed about 30 Ottawa warriors when they attacked the Fort. In the conflict, a French priest and sergeant were both caught outside the walls and killed. The Fort was commanded by Etienne de Bernard-Cyr de Bourgmont. Bourgmont was criticized for his handling of the incident when Cadillac returned Bourgmont and some soldiers from the Fort deserted. The French eventually captured one of the deserters who testified that the deserting party had shot and killed one of its own and cannibalized him. My guess is they were out in the wilderness and they lacked supplies and they just killed one of their own needed food. I thought that was a wild bit of research looking at that. Bourgmont remained a fugitive living amongst Native Americans and even took a Native American wife and had a child. In 1718, though, it seems like he lost his fugitive status as he was decorated with the cross of St. Louis in 1718 for being the first European to map the Missouri and Platte rivers. Back at the Fort, though, Cadillac was removed. He was moved from command under accusations of corruption. In 1710, François de la Forte was appointed as Cadillac's successor but instead sent Jacques-Charles-Renaud-Dubéassion to administer his role. In 1712, Jacques-Charles-Renaud-Dubéassion officially replaced Cadillac as commander. The Fox Indian tribe heard of this change in leadership at the Fort and planned an attack on the Fort after some of Cadillac's supporters had left. The Fox tribe besieged the Fort in late April with about 1,000 Fox, Sac and, I don't want to pronounce this right, Mascoutes, the Fort received reinforcements from many different sources that include Jean-Baptiste Bissot, Sire de Viscence, commander of the French outpost, Catyonga, and seven fur traders got to the Fort and they got to the Fort by essentially sneaking through Fox Indian military lines. So, while the Fort was besieged, these fur traders and Jean-Baptiste Bissot sent a French commander, they snuck through these Indian lines and were able to sneak into the Fort. It's pretty wild. Fort Detroit's commander, Dubéassion, sent out messengers and also Ottawa and Huron returned to the Fort's aid. When reinforcements came, the Fox were caught between the French and their allies, which forced them to retreat to what is now Windmill Point. After four days of siege there, the Fox surrendered, so their families would be spared. The French agreed, but after the Fox were disarmed, the French attacked and killed all of them. This was known as the Fox Indian Massacre. Heading into the French and Indian War, Fort Detroit was far removed from main areas of conflict. Eventually, on November 29th, 1760, Fort Detroit was turned over to the British Army's Riders Rangers two months after the capitulation of the French at Montreal. Three years later, Pontiac, a war leader of the Ottawa, rallied several tribes in what is known as Pontiac's Rebellion and attempted to capture Fort Detroit from the British on May 7th, 1763. Pontiac was an Indian leader and he sided heavily with the French and wanted to rally up the neighboring Indian tribes in the area to take this fort back. The military action would fail as the British were forewarned of the attack. The British force in the fort commanded by Henry Gladwin consisted of 130 soldiers with two six-pound cannons, one three-pound cannon, and three mortars. Also, the six-gun schooner naval vessel Huron was also anchored nearby in the Detroit River. Now, later on, we had a different fort, which was actually the opposite of what you see right now on the screen. It was actually a couple hundred yards from this fort. It was Fort Lernalt, aka Fort Shelby, and it had kind of a significance in the War of 1812. By that time, in the War of 1812 era, Fort Detroit was surrounded by the British army in what is known as the Siege of Detroit. At the time, the new fort had been held by American forces. The British general Isaac Brock, along with Native American tribes, tricked American forces into believing that they were militarily outnumbered by creating fictitious military correspondence letters and having them fall into the hands of Americans. The War of 1812 had just started, and essentially the British wanted to take the fort without many casualties from the Americans. So, essentially, the British general just counterintelligence and created a fake document of correspondence that led the American general to believe that their force was much grander. I mean, an amazing story, really an amazing story of military strategy. The Americans, becoming fearful of these fake letters immediately surrendered from a demand that was actually sent from General Brock to General Hull. Hull was the commander in Fort Detroit in the War of 1812. And this is the correspondence that the British general sent to the American general. The force at my disposal authorizes me to require of you the immediate surrender of Fort Detroit. It is far from my intention to join in a war of extermination, but you must be aware that the numerous body of Indians who have attached themselves to my troops will be beyond my control the moment the contest commences. Let me just tell you that I like this General Brock, even though he's not an American general, I like him. The guy used, I mean, intimidation, counterintelligence to lower the casualty rates in a military conflict. I mean, Justin, I love that story. The amount of intelligence it took to really, you know, force a surrender is just amazing. That being said, that's kind of a background into the two Fort Detroit's. Let's kind of go over these vintage maps of Fort Detroit. This is the first one. This map was produced in 1749. It is the obviously the French establishment of the fort. You can obviously tell just by looking at the text plan to do for the Detroit labeled. It's in French. We've got different labelings F, A, B. That is it can help us. That's an English. But if we look at some of the writing is a little bit hard to see. And if you look at the words right here, logomens de commandant. A, based on, I mean, I've taken French before and it says commandment and that means commander. I mean, I'm looking at it from a romance language perspective. My guess is the first one listed is the commander's office, the commandant office, the place where central command is and that's labeled probably close to the entrance. One of the main entrances to the fort and that's right here, very close to the river. And if we look over here, we see L and D. We look. Let's see. Jardin. Okay, so I've taken French before. Jardin is obviously a garden. So we can see that these kind of cordoned off green areas, gardening, it could be fruit, vegetables. I'm not exactly sure. It could be agricultural. See, looks like it could be agricultural as the amount of distance it is from the water and water supply for irrigation. See, we see Jardin, another that word again. I can't make out that cursive text and I apologize for that. But we can certainly see that agriculture really, it makes sense that the plants for food and whatnot would be close to the Detroit River. You know, I can't really read B. It's just a little bit too hard, the cursive writing. But certainly we can see the layout of the fort, most of the buildings very close to the front of the fort, close to the river. We can see that it slowly developed, the buildings developed in the back over time and just a really overall map. We can see some buildings off in the background outside of the fort. Let's see, this text is really hard to read. If we look at E, oh boy, it's just really hard to read some of that. Yeah, it's really hard. The text is really not great. You know, certainly we get a view and a layout of the perspective of the fort and how it was kind of in a square fashion. The other map that we have, I really like this map a lot, it is a Fort Detroit War of 1812 Field Guide map. Okay, very cool map in that we get to see how General Brock really intimidated Fort Detroit to get them to surrender. We can see the location of British batteries across Fort Detroit River. We can see, I'm guessing, this is a city sandwich. We can see a shipyard labeled right here on the Rouge River. We can see the landing of Americans July 5th, 1812. I'm going to have another video up that talks about the siege of Detroit and actually talks about this. They actually had to travel to Fort Detroit because it was a militarily very sound location during the War of 1812. Here's the fortified camp evacuated. Okay, so it looks like the encampment for Fort Detroit was across the river right here. And it seems they were right across the river. So very cool map that we have right here. We can see also the changes in elevation. This is a range of elevation right there. We can see it's Fort Detroit River. My guess is that the origin, now we talked about the two different forts. This is the new fort. This was the secondary fort. It was built a couple hundred yards away. Detroit, what's labeled right here, this is probably the location of the old fort right here. So you can see they built new fort just outside. So I hope these maps, you've learned some information from these maps as well as from the information, the historical background. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel. We do videos like these all the time where we look at old maps. We talk about the history of forts, different cities, of regional locations, of wars. I mean, we really love history and we love talking about history and also looking at old maps. So if you like that sort of thing, definitely subscribe to our YouTube channel. Definitely check us out. Leave a comment below if you have any questions or you'd like to say something. Definitely leave a comment below, like this, share this and I will see you guys soon. Okay, take care. Alright, bye.